Managing a Creative Life in a Chaotic World

Animals vs.Children as Characters

In my last post I talked briefly about the long history of animals in children’s books. Although early animal stories weren’t directed specifically at children, today they dominate literature for young readers and for several good reasons.

1) Children relate easily to animals.What child doesn’t pretend to be an animal? I seem to recall crawling around the house and yard as a kid, pretending to be a wolf, horse, jaguar, and just about any other animal I could think of. Fortunately, my research confirmed that this kind of behavior is common. Whew!

2) Animals are a good substitute for children.
Animals can be a substitute for children, with or without appropriate animal species characteristics. Depending on how the manuscript is written, a story’s characters could be portrayed as either children OR as animals. It then becomes the illustrator’s decision as to what the characters should be.

3) You can tell a story without reference to age, race, or gender.

Animals can be the great equalizer. For example, a book may have several kinds of dogs in it in order to portray diversity without having to portray specific races. Animals may be old or young, but other than that has no direct correlation to human age. And, without pronouns, an animal can be gender-free–how liberating!

4) You can imply personality or lay a twist on personality.

Animals provide the opportunity for the author and illustrator to riff off animal archetypes. Or, even more interesting is when the author goes against the archetype altogether as in the not-so-wise owl or the fastidious pig. Stereotyping is always less interesting, though, just as it is for human characters.

5) You can provide children the opportunity to deal with scary situations in an non-threatening manner.

It is much easier for a young reader to deal with anxiety producing situations when they involve animals instead of children. For example, it’s a lot less scary if an animal is alone and lost in the dark than if it’s a child.

6) You can safely get rid of adults.Adults can be a distraction to the real issues conveyed by the story and using an animal allows the main character to solve the problem without the assistance or interference of an adult.

7) And my personal reason for using animals in children’s stories? They can be a lot more fun . They can do things children just can’t do like fly, swim deep underwater without clunky scuba equipment, hibernate, make loud noises while they eat…well, you get the idea. They are also a lot more fun to draw since they come in a wider range of colors, textures, and sizes while humans are pretty limited in those regards.

As you can see, there are many reasons animals feature so prominently in children’s books. In my next post I’ll discuss how to match your story to the right animal character.